Cheap economical computer recommendations

[jw8725]

Hello all.

I want to slap in a PC for my staff. Its got to be economical so that electrical bills are kept to a minimum. I was thinking something with an Atom Intel processor would suffice here.

What say ye?

[cmarks]

Well, what's it for - for use in breaks? If you were concerned about the electricity you could always have a "rule" in place for them to shut the computer down after it's finished with?

[HarveyBall]

try the EEE Tops by ASUS, they are all in one PC/Monitor that run on the atom processor. They run windows XP and also have a nice touch screen interface all for £400 (from ebuyer.com)

They're very good for energy efficiency

[That Guy]

try the EEE Tops by ASUS, they are all in one PC/Monitor that run on the atom processor. They run windows XP and also have a nice touch screen interface all for £400 (from ebuyer.com)

They're very good for energy efficiency

That looks good. But I hate the fact your stuck with onboard graphics.

[mke]

Electrical bills for running a computer? It's the monitor that eats the power, not the processing. What is it to be used for (echoing earlier question)?

My suggestion, supplier close to me so shop around for similar closer to home: PC with no operating system. Less than £200. Add a monitor and all the bits, OK, around £300 total, assuming youare VAT registered. Take a look at CCL Online's (http://www.cclonline.com/product-categories.asp?category_id=677) offering, the second one down in the list with the AMD CPU. Intel have some extremely serious security questions to address before I'll see them as viable again.

Put Ubuntu on it. Support is everywhere. Get in touch if you can't find any locally and we'll point you at it. Comes with full internet capabillities including browsing and email, full office suite, graphics manipulation and design software and much more, all free.

Now, tell your staff to press the power switch on the monitor, the switch they can see and reach so it's easy, at the beginning and end of each session. No having to boot up and down again, just turns the power-hungry screen on and off.

[FireFleur]

Some LCDs use about the same wattage as some of the CPUs.

A general CPU can be 60 - 80 watts, the AMD 5050E is about 45w and that is low power.

An Atom is about <5w, which is significantly lower.

LCD is about 35 - 60w depending on size.

So, yeah a low power CPU will save you some power spend.

Intel has security problems, that is a new one on me :), but rara AMD.

CRT were typically about 160 - 180w, so it was sort of true back then and the processors were also a lot slower, but it does vary.

http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm

You can step a lot of CPUs down as well, so may want to look into that.

[mke]

Intel has security problems, that is a new one on me Came as a bit of a shock to me. But it looks very nasty: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/39825

Also, the smaller EEEs run Linux, more efficient so another power saving if you do decide to go for a laptop.

The saving on the OS and more on protecting the OS from malware will pay for a lot of electricity anyway. Why pay luxury goods prices for a commodity product?

[FireFleur]

Ahh thanks, I may have heard about that one, it involves microcode I think. Blue Pill and some girl on a hypervisor, the argument comes flooding back, in odd sound bites.

They can patch the microcode so shouldn't still be around.

ARM is cheaper than Atom, Atom you end up paying for the commodity of x86 compatibility oddly enough. Though I think you end up having to pay more for the motherboard for ARM, mini-itx for Atom shoudl work.

There is the CherryPal I think that uses a PowerPC chip, cheap system, and low power again and at one point they claimed 2 watts, but whatever it is low for the entire unit.

The EEEs are cool, but splash out give them all one :)

[mke]

Outside all that, i think the OP's taking the P. It was one to get the propellorheads going and hasn't he just done it? (and shut the super soundbite salesmen up too?) :D